PowerAgent Outside Plant Transponders

The PowerAgent OSP Concept

PowerAgent Outside-Plant (OSP) is a family of outside-plant status monitoring transponders, each designed for a specific brand and model of Cable TV OSP power supply. PowerAgent transponders are the most capable and flexible series of transponders in the industry because they leverage the ubiquity, low-cost, and proven reliability of off-the-shelf DOCSIS cable modems to enable their network communications capability. This architecture makes PowerAgent transponders DOCSIS future-proof, SNMP and HMS compliant, and uniquely cost-effective.

Architecture

All PowerAgent transponders are powered from the OSP supply being monitored, and generate DC operating power for the associated DOCSIS modem.

The transponder contains a powerful network-enabled processor which implements industry-standard protocols such as TCP/IP, SNMP, HTTP, UDP, DHCP, SMTP, TFTP and others. The SNMP proxy-agent is fully HMS compliant, ensuring seamless compatibility with other HMS transponders in a multi-vendor installation.

In addition to the network interface processor, PowerAgent transponders also contain another processor dedicated to the interface with the OSP power supply being monitored. This 3-processor architecture (cable modem processor, network processor, interface processor) is used to implement a very robust cross-checking function wherein each processor monitors the health of the other processors and resets them if a “lock-up” condition is detected. This self-checking feature makes PowerAgent transponders extremely robust, eliminating un-necessary truck-rolls to reset hung-up transponders.